Lesbian Mothers Support Society is a Calgary based non-profit organization whose womandate is to provide peer support for lesbian parents, their children, and lesbians considering parenthood.

Originally known as the Lesbian Mother’s Defence Fund, the group became operative in August 1981. In those days, the primary purpose of the group was to organize fundraisers for lesbian mothers involved in custody litigation based on their sexual orientation. But in the last 8 or 10 years, not one lesbian in Alberta has lost custody of her child/ren solely because of her sexual orientation, and in 1992 the society’s name was changed to better reflect the group’s activities.

Today, LMSS provides peer counseling, monthly potlucks which provide a safe and supportive environment in which lesbian parents and their children can interact, a small reference library of books and videos, and medical, legal, and psychosocial referrals as needed. We have organized regional lesbian conferences and local seminars. We frequently respond to media requests for interviews on the topic of lesbian parenting, we provide speakers to post-secondary educational groups such as social work classes, we have consulted with the local public school board on the implementation of diversity education in our schools, and we are currently working on the issue of step-parent adoptions by non-birth mothers. But it was in May of 1996 that LMSS took on another dimension. We went electronic with a homepage on the Web. This is the story of our experience.

LINKING LESBIANS!

I have always been a technojunkie. I admit it. I was the first of my friends to go out and buy Pong (remember that terribly slow and unexciting tennis game that eventually burned into your television screen.) When our son was born, that was a great excuse to buy a Nintendo. And when I came into a little bit of money, well of course a computer was a great educational investment for our child (not to mention the oh so cool games you could play while you waited for your child to grow old enough to use the thing!).

About three years ago, I began to be interested in the Internet, and after attending an introductory seminar, I was hooked So about two years ago I got an account with an Internet Service Provider, and with some members of the group watching over my shoulder, I went online. I went to a search engine and typed in the word “lesbian”. A few seconds later, the search engine informed me that it had something like 2 million entries. A collective “ooh!” resounded from our group. This was unbelievable! Here we were sitting in a living room in Calgary, Alberta and able to retrieve information about lesbians from around the world.

Needless to say our reference library grew by leaps and bounds as we collected reams of information that would be of interest to our membership. We also began to teach other members of our group how to use the Internet. Only two members of our group have Internet connections, so it has been difficult, but we have secured separate email accounts for those women that are interested, and our home is available certain evenings for them to use the computer.

But it was always frustrating to have to continually go through hundreds of bookmarked URLs to retrieve the information we wanted. Then we heard of a woman who was promoting lesbian presence in cyberspace by donating webpages to nonprofits. She agreed to give us space, and in May of 1996, Lesbian Mothers went online.

The idea of our webpage was to provide a place where all information that could be of interest to lesbian parents would be collected and indexed, like a library. Our first version of the page was quite crude, as we had no experience creating webpages, and basically we were teaching ourselves on the fly. As time has passed we are getting more sophisticated, but still have a long way to go. We are also still wrestling with the dilemma of making our page accessible by all browsers.

Going online has had repercussions that we never anticipated. We are currently receiving on a daily basis 40-50 emails from women around the world, 5-10 pieces of snail mail, and 5-10 telephone calls from out of province, and usually out of country. These are from women who have seen us online, and are desperate for contact with other lesbian parents. We get requests for legal and medical referrals worldwide. We do endless research questionnaires online. We have helped women set up similar groups in other countries. And we answer a seemingly endless stream of questions. Women have questions about alternative insemination, problems with ex-husbands, concerns about children growing up in lesbian households. They want to know where the nearest lesbian mothers group is to them. I think most of all they just want that connection to other women like them, and the Internet offers a safe and faceless form of communication that is uniquely suited to lesbians who may not necessarily be out in their immediate circle of friends and family.

When we don’t have an answer to a question, we throw the question out to one of several lesbian parenting email lists to which we belong, knowing that we will receive more than enough information to pass along. That is another joy of the Internet, the networking with other women that we may never get to meet, but who are like old friends after months of emailing back and forth.

So now LMSS is at a crossroads. We really need to have someone working fulltime to handle all the incoming requests for information, but we have no budget for that, and getting funding for lesbian groups in Alberta, well, after all this is the province that wants to dismantle its Human Rights Commission. We are in a position where we are responsible not only to the local women in our city, but now, it seems, we have taken on the world. This was not our original intention, but it has become a role that has been thrust upon us, and we will have to find a way to deal with this extra workload. And while we worry about being able to meet the expectations of the women that contact us, it is still very satisfying to be able to reach out and help others such as the woman from Africa who emailed us with this plaintive request, I am the only lesbian mother in Nambia. I need to talk to someone.

How could we not help her?

The Lesbian Mothers Support Society can be found at: www.lesbian.org/lesbian-moms

Susan High is a Calgary domestic goddess, and one of the coordinators of the Lesbian Mothers Support Society. Although LMSS occupies much of her time, she and her partner of 19 years are also on the tear trying to keep up with their 10 year old son. She is hoping in the near future to be able to secure funding that will transform her from housedyke to paid LMSS coordinator.

Email:highs@cadvision.com

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